Anil Agarwal of BloggersPassion

Anil Agarwa runs BloggersPassion, where he helps people make a living online. Learn how he was able to scale the blog to $5,000/mo.

Revenue of $5,000/mo

Email list size of 1,000

Founded in 2010

Hello! What’s your background, and what is your blog about?

Hi there! My name is Anil Agarwal, SEO expert and founder of BloggersPassion.

My blog is all about SEO, blogging and making money online which was launched back in 2010. The main audience of the blog are beginners and everyone who wants to learn how to build and grow a profitable blog that makes money. Currently, I make $5000 a month from the blog.

What motivated you to get started with the blog?

When I launched the blog back in 2010, it was mainly about blogging and using AdSense and other similar sources to make money. It took a lot of trial and errors initially but it eventually started making a decent income.

I’m doing SEO for over 10 years now and it immensely helped to attract more visitors from search engines and make more sales from the blog.

Finally, making money from online is NOT easy. You can’t make money online if you’re just passionate about your blog topics, you also have to analyze your competition, be persistent and grow from there despite all the challenges blogosphere throws at you.

What is the revenue model for the blog?

We use a lot of monetization models to make income from the site but the majority of the income comes from affiliate marketing and paid sponsorships from other partners.

I started making money from the 1st year of launching the blog and I made first few dollars from Google AdSense (it was really popular back then).

Currently, we are making an average of $5k every single month mainly from selling affiliate products ranging from SEO tools to WordPress to email marketing.

If you want to make money from blogging, always have goals. Break them into yearly, quarterly and monthly goals. That’s how you achieve them. Make sure to motivate yourself to work hard especially when things go south. Being consistent is the key.

What are some strategies you have used for building up the traffic?

I’m currently getting around 1 million page views a year.

Initially, it was all about publishing daily posts on the blog (with an average of 500 to 600 words). It worked well 5 years ago but won’t work now unless you’re creating really in-depth content with useful advice to your target audience.

Apart from creating really in-depth content (we publish 2000+ word articles every single time and we’ve been doing it for over 4 years now), link building also plays a crucial role.

Write guest posts, leave comments on other blogs and participate in other forums to start building links to your site.

If you want to get more traffic to your site, focus on the following;

Start networking with other bloggers and try to help them as much as you can

Unfortunately, we do a lot of testing with our email list (we’ve removed over 5000+ email subscribers over the last 3 years and we have a lot of reasons behind it mainly less open rates, no engagement etc).

Currently, we’re focusing on keeping a tiny yet highly qualified email list (we’re using Drip for better email automation) and it’s around 1000 email subscribers now. It’s always better to go with a targeted tiny email list instead of building a big list just for the sake of building it.

We send newsletters every single week (apart from the email series that get to new subscribers) and they mostly include blogging, SEO related stuff.

Know your why: Before you even think about building an email list, find out why you need an email list. Do you want to make money? Educate your audience or something else? The clearer you know your why, the better and faster you can build an effective email list.

Quality over quantity: Never focus on growing a huge email list. Learn how to make money with a tiny email list and scale up from there. Always remember that quality is always greater than quantity when it comes to building an email list.

Learn from the pros: Analyse how your competitors are building and growing their email list. Subscribe to their email lists and carefully listen to what they are saying and how they are promoting their products or services through their email lists. You can learn and implement the same to grow your email list as well.

How do you write great content that performs well?

It all begins with keyword research. We do a lot of research on finding profitable keywords before we even begin writing. Then, we also analyze the high performing content from the competitors to see if we can create content around it.

Once you know your target audience, coming up with fresh topic ideas becomes easy. So get to know your target audience along with their wants and needs to produce high-quality content regularly.

Use Google docs for content creation. You can save it even offline and you can outline your content with subheads really easily with Docs.

Our biggest lesson learned from creating content all through these years is: focus on writing for humans first and then optimize it well with specific keywords to please search engine crawlers. You don’t get more search traffic if you don’t care about SEO practices such as keyword research, on page optimization, link building etc. It’s as simple as that.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome with your blog? If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

The biggest mistakes include the following and try to avoid them as early as possible if you want to build a better blog.

Not building an email list from day 1. The email list is a goldmine if used right. The quicker you learn how to monetize an email list the better it is for you to grow your income along with loyal audience.

Not creating in-depth content. Initially, we mainly created lots of average 500 word blog posts which we have to later either remove or update them with more content. If you’re creating content, start focusing on writing in-depth content. A 2000+ word post is a lot better than writing 3 average 500 word blog posts.

Not networking with others soon enough. Networking is the fastest way to build and grow your audience. Most relationships also help you find new money-making opportunities so give #1 priority to building strong relationships with other bloggers. Start sharing their stuff, comment on their posts and start linking to their blog posts.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Reading books always help you become a better blogger. I especially like reading books on psychology, marketing, business etc. Apart from the books, I also read and follow a ton of blogs in my industry. My favorite bloggers are Neil Patel, Pat Flynn and Matthew Woodwards. All of them talk about SEO and making money online and provide great advice around them.

Listening to podcasts from people like Tim Ferriss, James Altucher, Pat Flynn helps you a ton to understand more about what’s happening in the marketing industry and you can find and implement a lot of their advice which is highly useful in building a better blog that makes money.

What’s your advice for bloggers who are just starting out?

If you’re a beginner blogger who’s just starting out from scratch, learn as much as you can about your target audience and your blog monetization strategy. Once you get them right, nothing can stop you from making money and building huge audience. Also be patient and stop treating blogging like a get rich quick scheme or you’ll fail miserably.

I see one common mistake most people are making which is not investing money. If you’re really serious about making money online, you have to invest first. It takes money to make money online. Invest in getting a good domain and hosting, using the right SEO tools, getting a unique design for your site and building your email list.

If you want to learn more about marketing and SEO, read blogs like Smart Passive Income, NeilPatel.com and Backlinko. These are 3 great places to learn more about how to build a great blog that gets more traffic and sales.